SA Affordable Housing January - February 2019 // Issue: 74 | Page 9

NEWS
Ruperts hand over 70 title deeds
Seventy Aberdeen residents became homeowners on 16 November
as Johan Rupert and his wife Gaynor organised and paid for the title
deeds to their homes through the Khaya Lam land reform project.
Johan Rupert hands over title deeds to Aberdeen residents.
K
haya Lam, which is an initiative of the Freemarket
Foundation, delivers home ownership to township
residents, deprived of their dignity and rights under
apartheid, by facilitating the conversion of council owned
rental properties into freehold title – at no cost to
the recipients.
The 1913 Natives Land Act prohibited black South
Africans from owning land in so-called ‘white areas’ –
restricting the question of land ownership entirely to the
ethnic authorities in the reserves, later known as
homelands. Black people in the cities therefore lived as
tenants on property owned by the local municipality,
which developed into what we know today as ‘townships’.
Not much has changed and as many as five million families
still live as tenants, or without ownership rights, across
South Africa.
Black people in the cities therefore
lived as tenants on property owned
by the local municipality.
Khaya Lam offers hope to the citizens of this small Karoo
town more than 20 years after the end of apartheid with
www.saaffordablehousing.co.za
the aid of well-known philanthropists Johan and Gaynor
Rupert.
Before personally handing the title deed certificates to
recipients, Johan Rupert said the people of the Karoo were
a ‘special breed’ and that the region was special to him and
his wife. Anton Rupert, Johan’s father, used to remind him
that this region produced the anti-apartheid activist
Reverend Beyers Naude, founder of the Pan Africanist
Congress Robert Sobukwe and anti-apartheid activists the
Cradock Four.
He said they have a special bond with Aberdeen because
it is Gaynor’s home town. Her father was a master builder
and built the magnificent church in the centre of Aberdeen.
The handover of title deeds to 70 new homeowners took
place in Rupert’s birth town of Graaff Reinet at the South
African College of Tourism (SACT) which was founded and
is funded by Gaynor Rupert. The presentation followed a
graduation ceremony of 92 hospitality students from
disadvantaged backgrounds who will go on to forge
careers in the tourism industry, supported and guided
by the college.
There were moving speeches by the Mayor Deon de Vos
and an Aberdeen title deed recipient. Master of
ceremonies was Councillor Willem Safers.
On 3 December Johan and Gaynor Rupert presented
more than 326 title deeds that they sponsored to new
homeowners in Stellenbosch.
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